So, one of the things that the downtime of this forum (as well as the downtime of my work schedule) impelled me to finish was my modular river project.
A long time ago, I purchased a single yard of blue vinyl, cut it into river shapes, and then... left it alone for six months, almost. With the help of my girlfriend, I finally got around to putting thin cardboard underneath the sections and now... viola!
To give you some idea of the scale that even a mere yard of material can give, here's a shot of my living room covered in rivers (and my gf's cat wandering through):
Here's a closer shot of the two sections that are meant to be 'sea-shore' bodies of water, along with a network of rivers leading to them:
for tabletop purposes, I'm dividing (and painting!) the water into three areas: L0 water (shallows), L1 water (waist-high), and everything else. In game terms, the everything else is just... unnecessary complication IMHO. Either it hides a 'Mech or it doesn't. End of.
Though I do need to repaint them a bit; I was a bit too blatant with the DARK and LIGHT and failed to take advantage of the vinyl's natural surface.
Each segment is about 10-12 inches long, and I got around 30 segments of varying thicknesses, along with 3 lakes and 3 'seaside' fronts.
I decided on three thicknesses of river segments: around 3-4 inches, with a band of L2 water in the middle; around 2 inches, with occasional 'pools' of deeper water but mostly meant to act as bridges from the biggest to the smallest; and 1 inch thick, or just enough to act as a barrier.
Also, even that picture fails to show the true extent of my river network:
Leftover sections that I ran out of thin cardboard for. *sobsob*
Finally, the best part of all this work?
It stores in that box pictured above, in a stack like so:
It took me about 8-10 hours of work, all told (half of it spent watching the Pixar movies and cutting), and the fabric cost me barely 5 bucks.
All told, I think it was worth it. Do you?
Next post: I tried too hard and I'm gonna show you the results of doing so, and explain how I'm gonna redo it. Heh....
